Friday, October 2, 2009

The Rubber Band Effect

Have you ever stretched a rubber band so far that when you let it go one part of it is permanently disfigured because it was overstretched? My emotions feel kind of like that right now. Overstretched. It's been a bit of a roller coaster ride these past few weeks. I have my good days and bad. I have bad moments in good days, and vice versa. Wednesday was a bad day. Mama picked up my dress. It has remained in its same repose on the bench in the kitchen where she laid it when she brought it home. I haven't been able to bring myself to look at it or touch it.

On the brighter and more positive side of things, I have developed a new obsession.Origami. It all began when I went to my homepage and they featured a DIY (do it yourself) origami lamp made of folded lotus flowers out of waxed paper, a food storage can, a light kit, and a hammer and nails. I have issues with the design flaws, so I've spent the last two weeks trying to figure out how I can modify it in order to be more functional. I've come up with a few ideas that I'm pretty excited about :) Not only that, but I have found a bazillion little things I want to try! Today my friend Bethany (who is super artsy) and I are going to craft. I picked up my origami paper today and can hardly wait to rip into the package, while avoiding ripping the paper that is, and get started!

Speaking of things I picked up today, I have had a story ruminating in the back of my brain since about Tuesday of last week. I was journaling when I used the phrase, "The trees have no words for me." And I could sense literary genius in it. Ever since characters have been coming to life in my mind with stories deep and untold that, apparently according to my subconscious, need telling! So today I picked up a notebook and some new Sharpie pens to begin writing. You may think me archaic, but I cannot "write" a story on a computer, I actually have to do the manual work. There is something about the movement of the hand and the flow of ink across a page that is inspiring to me creatively. That, and I think "writing" on a computer is too easy. If you dislike an idea you simply backspace it away, or just Control+X (in the case of Apple users, Open Apple+X) it away. But sometimes you lose something great in that process. You cannot reclaim it from the unforgiving digital memory of the machine where information is written, erased, and written over again. It makes editing less careful, less thoughtful. When you write you don't want to waste pages of paper (that's a lot of time and ink and trees!), so I think you focus more constructively on what is being written rather than just writing to get it all out.

At any rate, I'm really looking forward to starting to write this. It feels like the story is a deep basin within my brain that is going to start overflowing, and I need to get a release valve going before I lose anything valuable. Hooray for literary genius.